Through her goggles she watched patches of dark gravel appear, mixed with cement. Soon, Fernando and Manuel started heaving the gravel out, piling it against the garage wall where, later, it could be shoveled back into the pit-after the body had been disinterred.
If there was a body. And if there was…She thought about Dallas or Davis and the coroner working the scene; about the long wait of perhaps weeks or months until the case was resolved and they could close up the pit again, and pour fresh cement. She thought about her clients who were waiting anxiously to move in, who expected the work to be finished promptly-now, she was going to have to pay a steep penalty. Not envisioning this kind of delay, she’d deviated from her usual contract and allowed a time restriction to be written in, docking her a hundred dollars a day for every day over the agreed-upon finish date.
Earth began to show beneath the gravel. As Fernando reached to move a black drainpipe aside, Scotty reached to stop him, and Ryan fished her phone from her pocket. Time to call the department, they didn’t want to disturb anything more until they had Max or a detective on the scene.
The two men climbed up the ladder. Glancing at each other and at Ryan with renewed skepticism, they stood waiting at the edge of the pit to see what would happen next. Despite their boss’s crazy female notions, they were too curious to walk away. No one noticed that beyond the open garage, in the bed of Ryan’s pickup, the three cats sat in a row, half hidden beneath the tarp, also waiting for the victim to be revealed. No one could have said whether the four humans, or the three cats, were the more curious and impatient.
34
DISPATCHER MABEL FARTHY clicked on the phone, answering Ryan’s call. Ryan pictured the hefty blonde speaking through her headset, sitting in the open cubicle formed by the reception counter, her cluttered desk, filing cabinets, and shelves crowded with radios and the fax and copy machines. “I’m up at the Cowen remodel,” Ryan told her. “On Blakely. Max and Dallas know where. We had a phone tip this morning, guy said we have a body buried up here, down in a drainage ditch-into which we’d just finished pouring fresh cement,” she said wryly. “We’ve dug that out, dug out the gravel. We’re down to raw earth and don’t want to go any further.”
Mabel didn’t ask questions. “The chief’s out. Hold on, I’ll buzz Detective Garza. You okay? You sound pale.”
“I’m fine,” Ryan said, smiling at Mabel’s turn of phrase. In a minute, Dallas came on. She said, “You know the ditch we dug inside the Cowen garage?”
“Yes, the second Panama Canal?”
“I got a phone call this morning that there’s a body buried there.”
“What kind of call? Who was it? What time? You get the name of the caller?”
“He wouldn’t give it. It was…I was on my way up to the job, it was about ten. He gave me the message, said, ‘The detectives and the chief know me,’ and he hung up.”
Dallas was silent for a long time, undoubtedly thinking about the department’s anonymous snitch, the voice from out of nowhere, to which they had all learned to listen.
“ Dallas, I believe him. You…You’re cutting out,” she said, not wanting to be interrogated.
“I’m on my way,” he said shortly, with considerable irritation. “Don’t do anything. Wait for me.” When he’d hung up she stood outside looking around the property, wondering how much their careless coming and going this morning, so many people back and forth, had destroyed of the tire tracks and footprints. When she glanced up the hill, where the grass was swaying, she was startled to see Tansy and Sage slipping away over the crest as if headed home. Her phone rang and it was Dallas. “We’re just turning onto Cohen.” In a moment she heard cars approaching up the narrow road, crunching bits of gravel beneath their tires. Dallas ’s tan Blazer appeared, and Max’s truck behind it. As they parked, she glanced at the bed of her pickup where the tarp was rippling in a quick, scurrying movement. For an instant, Joe Grey peered out, then vanished, and the tarp went still.
JOE WATCHED DALLAS swing out of his tan Blazer. His small SUV was a few years older than Charlie Harper’s red model, and showed far more wear. The dark-haired Latino detective wore jeans, a white shirt open at the collar, and a leather jacket. Max Harper, stepping out of his pickup, was dressed in uniform this morning, as if he might have been in court. The two men headed into the open garage, stepping as carefully as they could between piles of wet cement and cement-covered gravel. As they stood looking down into the pit, talking with Ryan and Scotty, the two Latino laborers moved away.
Max said, “When did you get this phone call? Was it on your cell? Where were you?”
“On my cell. I was coming up the hill. Scotty and his men had just finished working the cement. You think I didn’t want to strangle the guy? You know what concrete costs? You know how long it takes to finish it? And look at the mess we have to clean up.”
Max said, “I’m surprised you tore it out. You queried this guy? What exactly did he say?”
“I asked him how he could know this. Told him I wasn’t digging up that cement, that I’d have to have proof to do such a crazy thing. He said he saw the guy bury the body, that the only proof he could offer was the body itself. If we wanted to be sure, we’d have to dig.”
“And you took his word for it,” Max said. “Where did he say he was? Did you ask him to come in, give a statement?” That was a futile question. The cats knew it, and Max knew it, he knew their unknown snitch wouldn’t do that.
She said, “The guy hung up, Max! I thought it could be a crank call. But then I thought about your snitch, I know he doesn’t wait on the phone to answer questions. I had two choices. Let it go, let the concrete cure, and forget I ever got that call. Or dig it up and call you.”
In the pickup, Joe Grey smiled.
“Are you going to hang around while we dig? Or are you going to laugh at me and leave?”
Max tried not to grin as Ryan’s temper rose. He exchanged a look with Dallas, who spoke with Fernando in Spanish, which none of the three cats understood except for the occasional familiar word, including Manuel’s interjected, half-joking “loco” as he glanced across at Ryan.
That made Dallas laugh. “Maybe not loco at all,” he said in English. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Max flipped open his phone and in a moment was speaking with the coroner. That cooled Ryan down, the fact that he wanted John Bern on the scene before they uncovered a corpse.
In Ryan’s pickup the cats settled in to wait, curled up for a little nap beneath the warm canvas. They were all three fast asleep when a car woke them, pulling up to park. Looking out from under the tarp, they watched John Bern step out of his white van.
Bern was young, slim, prematurely bald, his fine-boned face was unlined by the depressing nature of his job, as if the mysteries he set himself to unravel, in the cause of death and the identification of a body, far outweighed the grimmer aspects of the profession. Wiping his glasses, he entered the garage and stood talking with Ryan and Max and Dallas, looking at the lumps of gravel and the messy pile of slowly hardening cement.
“You did all this on the word of a guy you don’t know and who wouldn’t identify himself?”
“I believed him,” Ryan said shortly. “We’ve blown a whole morning and a bundle of money on this. He’d better be telling the truth.” She was losing patience and losing confidence. She wanted to get on with the dig, either to be vindicated or to stoically endure her embarrassment.